


wear chapstick when kissing the bomb

by el_em_en_oh_pee



Series: tumblr "drabbles" [7]
Category: One Direction (Band), Taylor Swift (Musician)
Genre: Apocalypse, F/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2016-07-19
Packaged: 2018-07-25 12:38:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7533100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/el_em_en_oh_pee/pseuds/el_em_en_oh_pee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every time Taylor inhales, it’s like breathing in ashes. She stalks through the rubble of the city, baseball bat in hand, hair stuffed up in a beanie. It’s best for everyone if no one recognises her anymore. After the fire-rains, she still tried to make music, tried to lift the spirits of those around her. After the deep, bone-aching freeze set in, she stopped trying. No one wants to hear it. No one wants to hear anything that reminds them of Before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wear chapstick when kissing the bomb

**Author's Note:**

> for the prompt "haylor apocalypse au", crossposted from tumblahhhhhhhr

Every time Taylor inhales, it’s like breathing in ashes. She stalks through the rubble of the city, baseball bat in hand, hair stuffed up in a beanie. It’s best for everyone if no one recognises her anymore. After the fire-rains, she still tried to make music, tried to lift the spirits of those around her. After the deep, bone-aching freeze set in, she stopped trying. No one wants to hear it. No one wants to hear anything that reminds them of Before.

Before the sun was obscured by the thick, malevolent clouds twisting greasily in the sky. Before the streets cracked open with quakes and stayed shattered as ice threaded and bloomed through the concrete. Before cold flames sprouted from the rivers and streams and refused to be smothered, even by the filthy falling snow. Before the sickness, and the riots, and the famine. 

Harry recognizes her still, of course, and his boys, and Selena. They’re the lucky ones (Taylor doesn’t let the lyrics of that song flutter through her mind. That song belongs to another time - a time when there were people enough in the city to fill an entire stadium to listen to her sing it). They’re rich, or they were, rich enough to build a bunker and stock it with canned goods and generators enough to provide just enough heat that their fingers stay cold, but not frozen. They were famous enough that national boundaries didn’t truly apply to them. Taylor had a plane. Taylor could get away.

Now she scrounges through the rubble for tampons and birth control and Tums, a baseball bat in hand in case she stumbles across any rabid ex-pets, or worse, any people. 

Harry walks with her. Zayn has protested - ever since he lost Perrie and Jade both to a horde that hadn’t learned there was nothing left to riot over anymore, he’s maintained that they shouldn’t go out in pairs, that they can’t afford the losses. 

Taylor understands where Zayn is coming from, but her heart flutters as much as it still can every time Harry laces her fingers in hers and says that he’d rather die fighting beside Taylor than spend the rest of his life wondering when she’ll come back, if it comes down to it.

The faint light breaking through the clouds is greenish, and glowy, and terrifying. It’s the same light that always precedes the hail. They’re too far away from the bunker to risk making it back. “Shelter,” Taylor says, as loudly as she dares. She’s got a scarf wrapped around most of her face to filter the air and keep her nose from freezing, so her voice is muffled. She still doesn’t want anyone but Harry to hear it.

“The old Sainsbury’s,” Harry says, moving closer, brushing a finger against the back of her hand. “By the bank, it’s just two blocks away and it’s still standing.”

Taylor hadn’t known that. She cleared it of pads and hydrogen peroxide two months ago and hadn’t gone back. “Lead the way,” she says.

It gets colder even though the wind inevitably stills as the hail approaches. They move quickly, squeezing through the broken glass of the front door, ducking under the bar handle. The rest of the wall is stone, miraculously uncracked. Most of this street is still standing. Taylor doesn’t like it; she doesn’t know who might be lurking in the darkened buildings. “Back room behind the till,” Harry says, glancing around. “We should pull shelving against the door.”

So they work quickly, trying not to let the metal of the shelving unit grate sickeningly against the linoleum floor, backing into the little employee’s room and blocking the exit with the shelves, closing the door against them. Harry unshoulders his backpack, takes out the emergency blankets in it: one shock, for warmth, and one woolen, for more warmth. “C’mere,” he says, sitting down, back against the wall and holding an arm out. Taylor wedges herself in the crook between his arm and his body, lets him pull the two blankets all the way around them, tilts to lean her head on his shoulder. Distantly, she can hear the first of the hail pound the sidewalks outside.

“We have to stay warm,” she whispers, and reaches in her pocket for the granola bar she’d stuffed in there earlier. Eating raises body temperature. She thinks. It might just be psychological. She hasn’t been able to wikipedia this kind of thing since the internet failed, already over a year and a half ago. She breaks it in half, stuffs her portion in her mouth, hands the other one to Harry. 

The other way to stay warm is sex. Or, rather, orgasm - sex is dangerous. Taking off clothes is dangerous. They can risk it in the bunker by the space heaters under blankets, but not in a poorly-insulated Sainsbury’s during a hailstorm. That’s why they never carry condoms on expeditions. 

Taylor is wearing two pairs of leggings under her jeans. She opens the top button and doesn’t unzip them - just enough that Harry can work his hand under. They have this down to a science. He fingers her until she’s gasping against his neck to stifle the sounds, and then she opens his belt and jerks him off, awkwardly, through his baggy jeans and his slightly-less-baggy sweatpants, while he stuffs his hand, slick with her moisture, into his mouth to stop any noises of his own. It’s formulaic. It’s survival. It still makes heat flood in the base of Taylor’s belly, because he’s still Harry and she’s still Taylor. 

When they’re done, and Taylor is licking Harry’s spunk off of her hand, she whispers, “Glad that if I have to face the apocalypse, at least it’s with you.”

Harry’s arm tightens around her shoulders. “Wouldn’t want it any other way.”

They don’t dare say ‘I love you’ anymore, because ‘I love you’ is as dangerous a thing to say as ‘goodbye’ these days, but Taylor still feels the words screaming out in everything she does, and everything Harry does, too. 

When the hail is finally over, and they walk out - Taylor’s hand on Harry’s arm to guide him around the melon-sized balls that will take days to melt, with the state of the world as it is, because even in the face of the fucking apocalypse Harry hasn’t gotten any less uncoordinated - the clouds are still ominous and dark, and the sun doesn’t shine. But she’s used to that. 

Taylor’s mom used to tell her, years and years ago back in their warm house in Pennsylvania, that the sun comes out after every single storm, eventually. Taylor’s grown up a lot since then. The sun doesn’t ever come out anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> [original work](http://dulosis.tumblr.com/post/68439488486/haylor-apocalypse-au)   
>  [title](http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/dgottlieb/2010/02/fifteen-ways-to-stay-alive/)


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